One year of “zero waste”

It’s been more than a year that I read that book, made myself a few muslin cotton bags and made a commitment to reduce our waste and as back then I still struggle to use the term Zero Waste for many, many reasons, but for lack of a better shorter term, and because nowadays is so easily recognizable, I still use it, especially in tags on instagram and will keep using it to categorize this kind of posts, however, there are a few things I wanted to address here first.

Even most of the more devotees to this lifestyle recognizes that is very difficult for an individual in our modern society not to create waste, but on a more personal level, in reality I cannot, at this stage of my/our life aim for a total zero waste lifestyle. Each person/couple/family have personal circumstances that must be respected, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change our habits, we must! However small steps and a more positive way of looking at what we can achieve is a better attitude and helps us to make long lasting changes that we can stick with more easily.

There was a time, earlier on, where I did try to shop zero waste and after awhile I came to the conclusion that I simply couldn’t keep up! I was stressing over it too much and more importantly, the simple truth is I just can’t afford it. That doesn’t mean its business as usual; what I’m trying to say is: in a more honest way, my aim is to reduce our waste, which we’ve actually managed to do! Instead of fretting about the amount of recycling and rubbish we were creating I decided to look at the amount we’ve reduced, which has been significant, and as I said above, this shift of perspective has been better for my mental health, therefore, I believe, easier to keep those changes and keep working to reduce it even further. Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I’m ready to share in following posts, some of the steps we’ve taken to reduce waste for our family of five with a limited budget.